Berkhamsted Golf Club

Lovely course. Beautiful surroundings. Starter was a great guy , very welcoming and staff in pro shop and bar also. Well worth a visit.

Beware the scam this club operates where they appear to offer a tee time booking service online, but actually it’s not real. We booked a specific tee time and paid for it at the same time. I then received an email confirmation which said in big letters “Tee Time Booking Confirmation”. However, when we arrived at the 1st tee at the correct time, we found a large number of members waiting to tee off. We told them about our booking, but they just sneered at us “Not possible. We don’t have tee times here.”
Referring back to the club’s website, it said the tee time you think you’ve booked is actually just “an estimated time of arrival” and “not a specific tee time”!! This raises so many questions about the club’s attitude to visitors. Why would anyone book an “estimated time of arrival” and why are all the slots 10 minutes apart which gives the impression that they are tee times.
Why does the confirmation email mislead people by stating prominently that a tee time has been “booked”?
And why does the club insist on taking payment for the green fee in advance when you haven’t actually booked an official tee time?
This all seems to be a scam perpetrated by the club on visitors and the misleading information about tee times on the website and in emails to visitors is entirely deliberate.
The situation is made worse by the fact that many of the members are very hostile to visitors. After we arrived on the tee and explained our situation, all the members insisted on going ahead of us, so we had to wait 30 mins to tee off. The course was completely overwhelmed with players which meant long waits on every tee and fairway. The first 9 holes took THREE HOURS which is crazy.
On one tee, we found two other groups waiting and when we told them we were visitors they asked a lot of personal and inappropriate questions, including how much we’d paid for the green fee. When we told them we’d paid the standard fee they mocked us and said we were fools for paying so much. They suggested to some other members that it would speed up play if they agreed to let a faster pairing go through or perhaps if they joined up, but they refused both options. All of this completely ruined any chance of us enjoying our round, for which we’d paid a lot of money. When we finally finished playing we went into the bar for a drink and were shocked to be charged very high prices, the highest we’ve encountered outside London.
I’m astonished that Berkhamsted Golf Club treats visitors with such total contempt. In 40 years of playing all across the UK we’ve never encountered behavior like this before
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Arguably the best layout in Hertfordshire with the course to match. Running firm and fast through the summer Berkhamsted keeps you on your toes with no hole allowing you to rest on your laurels.